Rebellion or Revolution — Albert Camus

One of the best books I finished reading in recent months was Albert Camus’s *The Rebel*. Somewhere in this book, in a brilliant passage, Camus draws a distinction between a “revolutionary” and a “rebel” and writes as follows:

“Revolution” is always rooted in the world of ideas, while “rebellion” always begins from the lived and personal experience of the rebel. Revolution is the injection of ideas into historical experience, whereas rebellion is an act that moves from bitter personal experience toward the idea of historical change.

Whereas the collective history of a rebellious movement is always a history of passionate yet fruitless struggle against the total structure of reality, and of a vague protest lacking clear methods, revolution is an attempt to shape actions according to ideas and to make political action worthy of itself by placing it within the framework of thought.

Rebellion always begins with saying “no” to despotic rule; revolution is saying “no” to the methods and practices of despotism. This is why the ultimate achievement of a rebellion is the removal of the personnel of power, whereas a revolution simultaneously destroys the structure of power and the foundations of its destructive methods.

Camus continues by saying that revolution has fundamentally the same meaning as the term we use for the movement of planets: a complete rotation leading to a new beginning. It is precisely for this reason that governments can never be revolutionary.

Revolutionary governments are revolutionary only in relation to powers outside their borders. Within the territory they govern, they seek their own continuation, and it is the task of citizens to revolt against their old and obsolete methods.

Rebel or revolutionary? This is the first criterion by which a political activist should be judged. To achieve fundamental change not only in the structure of power but in our practices of government and political interaction—which can persist in our political culture after any particular structure has disappeared—we need a revolution.

Aydin Areta